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To the naked eye, these new Old Navy shirts look perfectly normal. No misspelled words. No mismatched collegiate logos. No misplaced slogans. On closer inspection, you will notice a slight problem – those dates at the bottom were apparently pulled out of a hat. Those dates are meant to represent the founding year of each university. The years 1820, 1878, and 1881 were probably fertile years to found universities. The problem is the Universities of Iowa, Colorado, and Arizona were founded in 1847, 1876, and 1885, respectively.

We understand errors can happen, but this is inexcusable. Before learning of this defect, like Old Navy, I had no idea when these universities were founded. A simple Google search took me 1 minute and 43 seconds to verify the founding dates of each school. With less than two minutes of work, Old Navy could have saved itself from this embarrassment.

This mistake really should not surprise any of us. After all, Old Navy had to recall thousands of collegiate tees back in August after misspelling “Let’s Go!!” Proofreading is obviously not a strongsuit. If Old Navy can mess up such a simple phrase, we shouldn’t expect them to correctly handle “complex” dates and numbers.

To our knowledge, no lawsuits have been filed over these defective products. Certainly, some University of Iowa fan has been damaged by the discovery that his university is 27 years younger than Old Navy’s proclamation. Of course, there must be some level of comparative fault for having to learn a piece of your university’s history from a $10 t-shirt.